VALENTINE VOLUNTEERS: UC Davis students, staff and alumni helped raise funds for the Friends of the Yolo Crisis Nursery, selling boxed rose petals on Valentines Day to raise funds for the nursery. (Dateline went to press before sales were tallied up.) Two UC Davis sororities, Kappa Psi Epsilon and Pi Beta Phi, joined the effort as well. The good cause behind the Yolo Crisis Nursery is child protection, explained Becky Heard, a volunteer who works on campus as an event planner for the Graduate School of Management. If a parent is dealing with the loss of a job, an abusive spouse, lack of housing, or health issue, they have a place to take their children. "The parents can leave children in the safety of the nursery for up to 30 days," Heard said. "It's one of those amazing community services that few people know about." For more information, see www.friendsofycn.org. ... FANTASY LIFE: Fantasy author and onetime Davis resident Peter Beagle was profiled in the most recent issue of Davis Life Magazine — www.davislifemagazine.com. The author of the fantasy classic The Last Unicorn, Beagle was asked how he got inspired to write every day. "You can't wait around for inspiration," he said. "My uncles didn't. My uncle Moses used to say 'If the Muse is late, start without her.'" On living in Davis, Beagle, now residing in Oakland, found it remarkably quiet and conducive to the writing life. "I was one of eight people I'd estimate didn't work either for the university, or else to support it, the faculty, or the students. As long as I had an office to work in and a clear path to the books and the refrigerator, I was fine," he told the writer of the article, Jordan Sampson, a UC Davis aeronautical engineering student. ... DAYS OF WINE AND FOOD: Clare Hasler, the executive director of the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science, is looking forward to the doors opening on the facility. "Less than six months and counting," Hasler wrote in the institute's most recent newsletter. In addition to a wealth of lectures and new research centers like the Olive Center, the Mondavi Institute will uncork other events such as Women, Wine and Music: A Celebration, on April 30. The main course of that event will be a panel discussion on "What It's Like to be a Woman in the Wine Industry." ... FOOTBALL RECRUITING: UC Davis football coach Bob Biggs said last week that 11 student-athletes have signed letters of intent to join the football team while two more have signed athletic aid agreements. Seven of them are offensive players. UC Davis will enter its second season of NCAA Division I play this fall. The Aggies posted a 5-6 record last year, marking its first losing football season in the past 38 years. ... HONK IF YOU LOVE COMMUTING: It is no secret that many UC Davis staff live outside of Davis, where the average home price in the last quarter of 2007 was about $562,000. This, of course, means lots of people commute to campus and live, it seems, farther away in areas where housing is actually affordable. "We've seen decentralization for decades now," Patricia Mokhtarian, a UC Davis professor in the civil and environmental engineering department, told the publication Urban Transport. "People are having to travel further away not just to have a house but to have a three-bedroom house with a yard that we can afford." The university's new neighborhood project, West Village, is intended to address this problem. As envisioned, the 208-acre project site at the southwest corner of Highway 113 and Russell Boulevard would house an estimated 4,350 faculty, staff and students by 2025. ... COSMIC ENERGY: Professor J. Anthony Tyson will deliver a talk about dark matter as part of the Explorit Science Center's Science Cafe and Lecture Series on Feb 19. The lecture, "The New Digital Sky: Exploring the Dark Side of the Universe," starts at 7:30 p.m. in the Stephens Branch Library, 315 E. 14th St., Davis. Tyson said that scientists do not know a lot about dark matter and dark energy, both of which make up most of the universe. ... BASQUING IN DAVIS: Today the campus hosts a delegation of Basque officials led by Basque president Juan José Ibarretxe, the author of a hotly debated proposal for a referendum on independence for the mountainous region of northern Spain. The delegation intends to visit the Genome Center and the Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle Research Center, among other sites. As Dateline went to press Wednesday, Stanford University was dealing with protests and a petition drive to thwart a planned Thursday seminar there with the Basque group.

— Clifton B. Parker